“Although we do sell our own label—Ice River Springs spring water here in Canada, and True Essence purified water in the U.S.—the majority of our business, roughly 80 per cent, consists of the private-label work done for clients who market and sell the bottled water under their own store-brand labels at their retail outlets,” says company president Jamie Gott, explaining why the Ice River Springs label itself does not command the sort of ubiquitous shelf presence in Canada that the company’s sheer size would suggest.
“We focus on the private-label business—providing retailers with low-cost cases of store-brand bottled water ranging in sizes from 250 milliliters to 18.9 liters,” he adds, citing an all-star customer line-up boasting retailing heavy-hitters as Loblaws, Fortinos, Walmart, Zehrs, Shoppers Drug Mart, Costco, Canadian Tire, Pharma Plus, London Drugs, Real Canadian Superstore and Your Independent Grocers, among others.
Photo by Sandra Strangemore
And while the relatively recent embrace of the environmental sustainability movement by many of Ice River’s retail customers has definitely had an impact on the company’s keen emphasis on eco-friendly production and packaging processes, according to Gotts, the company’s commitment to environmental protection traces much further back in time.
“Sustainability and reducing our carbon footprint are important ongoing concerns for our company, and we’ve been working to reduce our carbon footprint since 2000,” Jamie Gott states.
“In fact, at the Feversham facility we built an underground pipeline that runs 5.6 kilometers directly from the water source, so that we no longer need trucks delivering water to us,” he points out. “This literally helped us take hundreds of trucks off the road every year.”
As for the packaging side of the business, Ice River Springs recently became the first water-bottler in North America to offer its water products in the recyclable, aseptic Tetra Pak paperboard cartons following last year’s installation of a turnkey aseptic packaging line from the Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Tetra Pak Canada Inc.
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